Freddie Mercury: The Biography (22 page)

Although Mercury’s original plans had stalled, he was not in a hurry to rush out his debut solo album during Queen’s year
off. Indeed it would be two years before it surfaced. He meanwhile enjoyed spending some overdue free time with Winnie Kirkenberger,
generally living it up in Munich. At times he overdid it, once ending up with his leg in plaster for six weeks. Rumours that
he’d been involved in a club brawl were scotched, but when his jealousy was aroused, for all his foppish front, Mercury could
be aggressive.

His drug intake must take some of the responsibility for his violent tendencies too. It was hard for friends to predict his
moods. He was quite capable of flying into sudden uncontrollable rages, when he would demolish furniture and roar abusively
at the top of his voice. Afterwards he’d remember nothing. Reports that once, in the grip of a sexual drug-crazed frenzy,
the star tried to strangle Barbara Valentin are not true: ‘That just never happened,’ says Valentin. ‘I don’t know where that
story came from.’

Mercury considered he knew the world’s hottest spots, but he was always open to suggestion – particularly if it sounded risky.
In New York, he visited the Gilded Grape, where he’d been warned he would need a bulletproof car and fast driver at the ready.
Such ingredients were guaranteed to take him panting downtown, on the scent. After several weeks of manic clubbing and sex,
he suddenly gave up his nocturnal city prowling for the sunnier climes of California.

He had arranged to meet Michael Jackson, who was working on his follow-up to
Thriller,
with a view to recording with him. But before that was possible, Mercury had something else to do. As he would later admit
in a rare interview he gave to Radio One DJ Simon Bates, after weeks of excess he needed to get himself fit before undertaking
any work with the health-conscious Jackson. ‘There was an attitude built in there,’ says Bates. ‘Freddie felt that if he was
physically in shape, he would be mentally disciplined.’

Mercury joined Michael Jackson at his private studio in Encino, where they completed ‘Victory’ and ‘State of Shock’. Mercury
was still using cocaine, and initially, while recording with Jackson, aware of his views on the matter, he would discreetly
vanish to the toilet. But the necessity to disappear so often irritated Mercury. Although he was not in the habit of wilfully
upsetting outsiders with his behaviour – be it drug-taking or homosexuality – this time he grew sloppy. Seemingly
Jackson witnessed Mercury snorting cocaine, and this was enough to freeze their friendship. As a result, the tapes of their
two duets are unreleased. ‘State of Shock’ did surface a year later on one of Michael Jackson’s albums, but Mick Jagger had
replaced Mercury as guest vocalist.

That rare question-and-answer session between Freddie Mercury and Simon Bates took place in London, after work ended with
the American superstar. Aware that Mercury was notorious for not giving interviews, Bates asked him anyway. He didn’t look
for the reason why when the star unexpectedly agreed to meet him. The interview took place at Queen’s offices. When Bates
arrived Mercury greeted him graciously, making him comfortable and plying him with Earl Grey tea in exquisite china cups.
They talked about art, among other things. A formal ninety-minute interview followed.

‘He was almost Victorian in his manner,’ says Bates, ‘very quiet, extremely polite with the tea and biscuits and chatting
– and I don’t say that as a criticism. He was very much the middle-class man entertaining a guest, and it was all quite charming.
He also went out of his way to show an interest in what I liked. He was fascinated with art and clearly very knowledgeable.’

That Mercury was nervous quickly communicated itself to his interviewer, as Bates recalls: ‘Yes, he was a little insecure.
I had a Radio One producer with me, and when it came to the moment to start the actual interview Freddie didn’t want to talk
in front of him. We had to be alone.

‘I asked him if there were any areas he’d rather not stray on to, and he asked me instead to run through what I wanted to
cover, and when I’d finished he said he didn’t want to talk about his parents. There were no preconditions as such, but he
would indicate that he’d rather not discuss such-and-such. The gay issue never came up, and why should it? It had no bearing
on his work as a musician.’

During the interview Mercury relaxed. Far from putting on his standard performance, he revealed quite a lot about himself.
‘He was happy to talk about himself,’ confirms Simon Bates. ‘He freely confessed to being a party animal, and that he liked
to enjoy life to the full. He also liked to travel with Queen’s touring commitments, to get away from Britain as often as
possible, he said. He believed there were three of him. One was professional and hard-working, the second was the party animal
and the third liked to be alone.’

Although Queen had temporarily disbanded, they remained in touch. For the past six months each member of the band had been
involved in their own personal projects. In July they got together at the instigation of Jim Beach. In addition to being Queen’s
manager, Beach had links with the film world and approached the band with a proposition. A film of John Irving’s novel
The Hotel New Hampshire
was in progress, starring Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster. Would Queen like to record its soundtrack?

Mercury was interested at once, and, with John Deacon, he flew to Canada to meet director Tony Richardson. Having read the
darkly bizarre tale during the flight out, the meeting in Montreal went well, and they agreed to start work on material for
the film score. Fixing a date in August, Queen met at Record Plant Studios in Los Angeles. They had never recorded together
in America, and the novelty of this combined with the break from each other had rejuvenated them.

As far as translating this new vigour on to the soundtrack went, however, the initial enthusiasm quickly fizzled out. Tailoring
their music to the novel wasn’t easy. They liked the work itself, and for a while they persevered. But it proved a mismatch.
Disappointed, the band had no option but to pull out of the project.

Recently Queen had signed to the US label Capitol Records, so they concentrated on making their new album.
Recording was at the Musicland Studios, with a release date set for early 1984. The first single chosen from the album was
a Roger Taylor number, ‘Radio Ga Ga’. The video promo, extravagant even by Queen’s standards, reached epic proportions. Director
David Mallett used five hundred extras, all recruited at short notice from the band’s fan club, and the shoot took place one
late November day at Shepperton Studios. The fans were all identically dressed, and at each chorus their role was to clap
their hands in sequence above their heads. It wasn’t complicated, and they were soon performing like professionals – unlike
Queen. Led by Mercury dressed in black trousers and jackboots with what looked like strips of a red bandage as a shirt, all
four band members at one point messed up a take by clapping out of time. The finished product, however, was a tight-set routine
that was later adopted by concert crowds the world over.

Mercury’s thoughts were preoccupied by his solo album, which he had begun to work on in Munich at the start of the year. As
producer Mike Moran, later one of the star’s closest friends and co-songwriter, reveals, Mercury never deliberately set out
to distinguish his solo work from his work with Queen. But Mercury’s heart lay more in ballads, and while recording his own
material he intended to explore this fully. He admitted he wrote commercial love songs, maintaining that what he felt strongest
about in life was love and emotion. ‘I’m not a John Lennon who sleeps in bags for I don’t know how long,’ Mercury insisted.
‘You have to have a certain upbringing and go through a certain amount of history before people will believe in what you’re
writing about.’ Be that as it may, Mercury never allowed any of his lyrics to reflect his personal experiences too accurately.

At this time he was still leading a hectic social life, and one night in particular stands out in Peter Stringfellow’s memory:
‘My Hippodrome club had been open for about a year when I
held my first Monday night gay night. There was a specific sound in music then, which was very high energy and exciting and
closely associated with the gay scene, and this was blasting out. I was on the balcony with my girlfriend on my way to have
a meal when suddenly a weird atmosphere came over the place. There was a big buzz of excitement and everyone, about 2500 people,
had stopped whatever they were doing and turned to look at something. I wondered what on earth it could be, then I found out.
Freddie Mercury had arrived. He was dressed all in white, and it was literally as if the Queen of Sheba had walked in. The
crowd went absolutely berserk.

‘It was a powerful example of Freddie’s personal power because, make no mistake, he had that power. A thunderous round of
applause got up, which, of course, Freddie took entirely as his due. He wasn’t at all embarrassed. In fact, quite the reverse.
His attitude was, “Well, of course!
I’ve
just walked in. What can you expect?” A great mass of people surged forward, but his bodyguards immediately closed ranks,
and you couldn’t get near him any more. He moved off with his entourage and set up court at a far off table.’

According to Stringfellow, Mercury would never stay in his clubs if he himself wasn’t present. He adds, ‘But Freddie had changed
since that first time we met in Leeds. By now he lived in his own world, doing his own thing, and few people got near him.
I became, like so many others, a Freddie-watcher, and he was the biggest star. Really, no one could touch him.’

Unless, that was, he chose to reach out himself. Before Mercury returned to Munich he was to meet a man who was to become
very important to him. He had gone to one of his favourite haunts, the Cocobana, a gay basement club in South Kensington.
Quite late in the evening he approached a stockily built, dark-haired man who was propping up the bar. Mercury offered to
buy the stranger a drink, to which the man replied, ‘Fuck off.’ Never one to press unwanted attentions,
Mercury walked away to rejoin his noisy entourage, without even discovering the man’s name.

He was in fact Jim Hutton, an Irishman who worked in a barber’s shop concession in London’s Savoy Hotel and shared a house
with his lover in south London. When Hutton’s boyfriend joined him at the bar, he was quick to reveal the identity of just
who he had so rudely rebuffed. Like Winnie Kirkenberger, with whom Mercury was still involved – and despite the sort of reaction
Peter Stringfellow had witnessed – Hutton maintained that the name Freddie Mercury was not familiar to him. Mercury, at a
quick glance, had looked quite skinny, and Hutton didn’t fancy him anyway. For Mercury this couldn’t have been the first time
he had been rejected, and he probably forgot about it.

‘Radio Ga Ga’ was released on 23 January 1984 and went straight in to the charts at number four, rising two places, but ultimately
denied the top slot by Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’. It marked another milestone within the band, however, as now all
four members of Queen had a top ten hit to their credit. Roger Taylor’s success was to be marred briefly a week later, though,
with an incident in Italy during Queen’s first live performance in fifteen months.

At the beginning of February Queen headlined at an annual music festival in San Remo. It was there, backstage, that a row
developed between May and Roger Taylor, which almost resulted in a fight between the two friends. When asked later about this,
Mercury described it as a ‘very heavy scene’ that developed from some tomfoolery. ‘It was Roger squirting Brian in the face
with hairspray or something,’ he said. ‘They nearly came to blows. It was a very tiny dressing room, very hot, and the whole
thing just snowballed.’

To Mercury it confirmed how much tension remained among the group. Quick to recognise the potential gravity of the situation,
he leapt between the feuding men and poked fun
at them mercilessly. Initially neither May nor Taylor was in the mood for Mercury’s antics – which could have fanned the flames
– but he was so relentless that they eventually dissolved into laughter, and sanity returned. Onlookers have since credited
Mercury with more than rescuing the moment, convinced that, in fact, he saved the entire future of Queen. But if a story Mercury
once told is to be believed, he didn’t always get away with sending up his friends.

‘One night Roger was in a foul mood, and he threw his entire bloody drumset across the stage. The thing only just missed me.
I might have been killed!’ Mercury exaggerated. That night in San Remo, ‘Radio Ga Ga’ went down a storm with the delirious
crowd. Days later, on 7 February, Capitol Records released it in America as their first Queen single, where it lodged in the
chart at number sixteen. In Britain ‘Relax’ refused to budge but in nineteen other countries the song hit number one, in some
cases remaining there for weeks.

Having learnt the lessons of
Hot Space,
when their new album,
The Works,
was released later that month, it gave fans exactly what they wanted – lots of harmonies, a meticulous production and the
usual clever musical arrangements. Above all, though, the material was much gutsier, mainly thanks to May’s insistence. Their
reward came when it stormed into the album charts at number two.

To follow on from ‘Radio Ga Ga’, the second single from
The Works
was ‘I Want to Break Free’, the video for which was again to be directed by David Mallett. So far Queen’s videos had been
imaginative, even outlandish, and certainly expensive, but on this occasion they decided to have some fun. Granada TV’s
Coronation Street
is the longest-running soap on British television, and Roger Taylor suggested that they should each dress up in drag as one
of the female characters from the show.

The video was split into three separate sequences. The first showed Queen in a crowd of moronic-looking futuristic
miners. Filmed one chilly March day in a warehouse at Limehouse Studios in London’s Docklands, it again featured hundreds
of fan-club volunteers as extras. The next day the second and main section was shot in a Battersea studio, and for this the
band dressed up in drag. Responsibility for this was automatically attributed to Mercury. But he shrugged this off, and when
asked by one TV presenter how he had persuaded the rest of the band to dress in women’s clothing, he quipped, ‘They ran into
their frocks quicker than anything!’